Film · 1993 · Films · 1990s
Shadowlands
Scored from 84 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
C.S. Lewis — 'Jack' to his friends — is an Oxford don, Christian apologist and children's author living quietly with his brother Warnie in 1950s England, telling lecture audiences that pain is God's megaphone to a deaf world. His correspondence with Joy Gresham, a blunt American poet, becomes a visit, then a friendship, then a civil marriage arranged only so that she and her son Douglas can stay in Britain. When Joy is diagnosed with bone cancer, the paper arrangement turns into a real attachment and Lewis's tidy arguments about suffering are tested against his own. Richard Attenborough directed this biographical drama, adapted by William Nicholson from his own play, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
Released in 1993, Shadowlands is a biography, drama and romance film. The runtime is 131 minutes. Its certificate is PG. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom and the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 558 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. Only 84 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 87 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Shadowlands lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1990s (4,082 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 84.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
